Eddie Van Halen Quotes

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

Make your own music. It can be done.

The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

Even if I play a similar role to one I've played before, I will never play it the same, I'll always try to do something different with it.

When I'm making the music, I feel like everything I throw out has to work. It counts. Because if you don't have people turning they neck all the way around to see what it is, it ain't stick on the wall.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

There's no set way to do anything. Sometimes you have to go outside the box; sometimes you can do things the standard way. Like, you don't have to have a beat to write a song: sometimes you can write lyrics without the music.

I think of jazz as being homage through innovation. Don't quote that as a definition, but it comes pretty close.

Playing live is about going for it .. it's about bringing it ... you should see a bunch of people trying out stuff, actually performing, instead of learning the record and recreating it note for note. I can't play the show the same way every night .. I really need to be in a creative environment, every night or I'll go nuts ... my manager accuses me of singing just long enough to get me to my next guitar solo - which is true.

Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.

If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book... that's no fun at all.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers.

You've only got 12 notes and however you mix them up is your thing.

I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

I am like a TV antenna. I catch everything that is in the air, and then I do it my way.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

I really enjoy creating music onstage, to participate in making music live.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.